skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Simulationism is predicated on the hypothesis that we could construct a completely accurate simulation of our universe in our universe, as if recursively-simulated universes are possible it becomes vanishingly unlikely that we do not live in one, so demonstrating that that's possible would be pretty important.

Actually it wouldn't have to be "a completely accurate simulation of our universe in our universe". A "somewhat accurate simulation of our universe in our universe" would also do for the statistical purposes of that premise. If you have recursively-simulated universes, even if they are not 100% like each other, it shouldn't change the probabilities, right?

That said, I don't fully agree with the main premise:

>if recursively-simulated universes are possible it becomes vanishingly unlikely that we do not live in one

Sounds to me somewhat akin to the faulty "ontological proof of the existence of God" ("Anselm defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, a greater being is possible—one which exists in the mind and in reality.").
My wife has a win7 phone, very similar with the huge icons (part of the reason she bought it was she could see it without her glasses on). However, I hate using it. My android phone isn't what I'd call intuitive, but I do know exactly how to get where I want to go, ie: push the expanded apps button, scroll around for settings. Took about 4 times to find the right settings button for bluetooth on the win7 phone, I knew pretty much where to go immediately on my phone from the start.

So...I'd say ease of use is high as long as you only want what is on your home icons, but not so much after that.
I switched from Pathogen to Vundle, at the prodding of people on HN, and I can't say I am all that thrilled about the difference. It basically does what Pathogen does, plus it does a bit more. The issue is that the "bit more" that it does just doesn't seem... polished.. to me, and covers things that I never found troublesome to do manually anyway. I'm not going to switch back (since it does what Pathogen does there isn't a reason), but I don't think it is better, just different.
Secure Java Encryption and Decryption
I'm a very satisfied edis customer. I used one of their dedicated servers for years and recently switched to the KVM Premium. I'm very happy with the performance and their support is excellent. The only downside, as mentioned above, is the limited space.
‘Virtual Supermarket’ Launched at Train Stations
Show HN: Silly Face Society - A game about making faces with friends
"Request a quote"!?
This is definitely a possible solution, but I found this put the monitor too far away for my liking. I am working on a folding mount for the monitor which I hope to finish in the next week or two.
Agreed about AOL, and I'd cite Compuserve as an additional example. Fundamentally, I feel these companies are the online equivalent of shopping malls - consistent, curated, and safe. They even have the same sort of controversies: controversial photos of breastfeeding Moms on Facebook don't seem all that different from kerfuffles over breastfeeding in a mall food court. In pg-speak, facebook would be more of a cathedral than a bazaar, but I'm not quite ready to equate shopping with religion :-)

I don't think there's anything wrong with this; I'm not a shopping mall type consumer, but I enjoy wandering one now and again and can see the attraction. From an investment standpoint, it strikes me that the value of brick-and-mortar shopping malls is very much a function of the diversity and quality of the tenants they can attract, making Zynga the equivalent of the 1980s amusement arcade.
For kids, that won't be the same. It needs to be physical, something they can touch and see.
I felt like the OP is lacking in practical details (besides, try our product) but I think the topic is good: kits/steps to building a launch site for any occasion for near-0 cost.

My guess is:

- Twitter Bootstrap
- Amazon S3
- memorable bit.ly link (bit.ly/kickapanda) that goes to S3 page
- Google Analytics
- Something like AddThis/Sharethis/etc. to do social media share buttons quickly.
I did not find that in my search for a solution to this problem before I attempted to build the UrbanDesk. It looks a bit out of my price range...
What Do Consumers Think of the iPhone Map App?
Get a low-end (HTC Legend), a mid-end (HTC Desire / Moto Droid), and a high-end (Samsung Galaxy Nexus or S-II/III) device, and you are good to go. Also get a cheap tablet if you need to support that. Always develop on the lowest end device as a rule, and the optimizations you apply to make it usable on it will make the app super snappy on higher end devices. Choose Android 2.2 as your target platform and you include 96% of Android devices: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Always use dp instead of px, use dynamic layouts (like HTML/CSS) instead of absolute ones (like in iOS), use 9-patch or XML drawables wherever you can, don't fight the framework. Use the compatibility library for fragment support and other cool stuff, and use them wherever you can. Be careful about bitmap memory consumption, that's a gotcha on low-memory devices.

If you don't mess around with low-level stuff like NDK or OpenGL you should be good to go on the very most devices. The well-tread Java API paths are not as scary as some blogs want to make you believe. You don't have to own all the 10k devices which exist, because most of them have stock Android installed. For special cases you will receive stacktraces from people's devices in the Play dev console - or you use one of those crashlog services.
To felipemnoa (since there's no reply link under your latest post in my view)

All solid matter moves forward in time at the same speed, minus the speed in which it's moving in the other 3 dimensions. Light and other particles only move forwards in time.
Marissa Mayer Parts Ways With Another Top Yahoo
Dear HN moderators: the original title (about 43 Android emulators within the browser) was far more informative than this rewritten version.
If it is articulating, then it would simply be pulled out toward the user. One would just need to retract it before pulling down the bed.
Interesting test, but it's not news if you know something about code optimization.

Caching of the data may also play a part on similar cases (but not this one - or better, the effect is negligible)

Here's a little test that can be tried. Make the test result (inside the if) be true or false alternately (for example, sum only if the index is even), see how long it takes.

Spoiler: modern branch predictors can detect and predict cyclic conditions
There are two ARM A9 cores (running Ubuntu) and 16 custom Epiphany cores.
It is possible to enter completely fake information, rather than someone else's address. (For example, aside from the burden on the post office, I think entering a street address for an apartment complex without an apartment number harms no one.)
That's a tautology and explains nothing whatsoever.

All you've done is explained a word by simply repeating it.

The reddit comment doesn't explain anything either - as the very first comment under it says.

If you want an actual accessible explanation see my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4637451
Is this the iCloud/Google Contacts sync solution I've been waiting for?
Isn't this just an argument against inconvenience? I.e. "If this were true, it would make other math, etc very difficult".

The same argument could have been waged against the heliocentric model. Occam's razor is not a natural law after all.
Building On Maker Movement, Hardware Startups Pitch At HAXLR8R Demo Day
Can I provide a SD card as opposed to a USB stick? Still not sure why I would want to do this, but I suppose it's better than the RPi just sitting in my drawer...
Great job. I came up with my own ghetto solution using event tracking, yours is definitely better.
One of the stronger use cases we've seen is sellers doing competitive research due to the visual format. Obviously this hurts CVR a bit (along with encouraging browsing), but that's just the nature of the site. We're encouraging lots of clicks on a variety of listings, but with the potential for more serendipitous purchases.
I'll be the token Opera guy in the thread and reiterate that they have a mobile simulator as well: Mobile Emulator.

It's annoying that it doesn't come with default iOS device settings, though, but it's a great alternative to running a server to test on.
The title is a bit linkbaity, but it sounds like this executive wasn't working on anything urgent, since he hadn't been seen at the office in a month.
If I weren't already running a company, I'd jump on this in a heartbeat. Spending a weekend working on people-matching algorithms sounds like a blast.
Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique
One thing I could foresee happening with the increased use of furniture/concepts like this (the UrbanDesk, as well as some of the other products from other companies) is that a user may get disoriented from using the same space for multiple purposes. I like having a room for different functions. A room for sleeping has a different feel than a room for working. A room for eating breakfast has a different feel than a room for eating dinner with family. A room for relaxing and watching TV casually, has a different feel than a room for entertaining guests. You get the picture. This helps create mental and emotional "spaces", but also leads to a lot of wasted space. With more people wanting to move back to the cities, I imagine this distinction between mental and emotional "spaces" will become more blurred. Does anyone know of any good products or services that would compliment these products? I'm thinking along the lines of programmable/wireless ambient lighting.
I'd largely agree with you with regard to Systems Hungarian Notation, but Apps Hungarian Notation has made my job much easier when talking about whether data is sanitized/unsanitized (or other similar distinctions that fall under the same type) in the scope of a larger program. In that case, it can prevent programmers from mistakenly interpreting the state of the variable, which is much harder to easily glean than the type.
If only the view was not blocked by a zillion ads!
I love this idea as a consumer. Just using it for an international VPN alone would be super worth it.

The biggest factor is the effort of setting up the OS on my Raspberry Pi, packaging it, and shipping it. If I could prepay say... $50-100 USD for a fresh Pi, cable, pre-installed Arch on a SD card, and a small setup fee, I'd be all over it. Especially since getting a hold of more Raspberry Pi's is such a pain right now.

As others mentioned, it's unclear what the risk of this "unlimited for free!" deal falling through, but I'd be willing to take that risk at the setup price of this scale.
Sorted arrays make it easy for a simple branch predictor guess correctly, if the branch predictor guesses correctly then you avoid a pipeline stall.

Assuming the median value in the array is 128 then for the sorted case the first half of the array will have one cache miss and the second half will have one cache miss.

If the OP optimized their code, sorted/filtered the array and then summed only those values greater than 128 it would be obvious why sorting is faster.
Everything being the same color can easily lead to a feeling of being "in a maze of twisty passages, all alike". It's like gray dialog boxes that pop up more gray dialog boxes: technical users tend to have an ontological hierarchy in mind as they navigate so it's no big deal, but most people get quickly overwhelmed and feel lost/overwhelmed. [Not that I'm saying that simply coloring dialog boxes differently would necessarily help here! Just that them all being gray adds to the overwhelm.]

I strongly disagree that color aiding in use points to a larger accessibility problem — perhaps you just mean that if color is necessary for use you've got a problem (which I'd certainly agree with), but while I could get by in my everyday world with monochrome vision, I'm glad I have color cues all around me that aid me in distinguishing amongst objects quickly and with minimal effort.
There is a board in the back that supports the mattress when the bed is raised up, and it is held down to frame / slats with some nylon cord which is under the sheet so it is not really visible.
It should be noted that this is a mathematical paper, and may have no basis in reality.

Just because you can calculate something, doesn't mean it actually exists. (Although the fact that it does sometimes exist is one of the true wonders of the world.)

This is also true of the Alcubierre drive that was in the news a little while ago: It's a mathematical solution, but my have no basis in reality.
You explained in 8 sentences something that I have been struggling to understand for years. Amazing, thank you!
I realize this is a different project, but since it looks similar: installing Janus was the worst decision I ever made while looking to improve my Vim experience.

It actually made Vim worse, sometimes by just slowing things down, other times because of the lack of quality control in the bundled plugins. One plugin actually caused data loss many times – it completely froze the editor when a certain syntax pattern was typed. All with just the default Janus settings.

To that effect, I hope quality control in spf13 is really, really good.
Hey, does anybody remember that thing that was wildly popular last year? I was going to mention it, but I can't remember what it was.
HN ranking algorithm simulator
This also confused me initially.

I think your copy needs some improvement for clarity.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I thought Codeq is more of an analysis tool. Your code would still be files in a git repo.
Looks really cool. If these were done and you were offering them for $650 I'd buy one, but donating to a kickstarter and maybe getting one next May doesn't sound like fun...

You can take down my email (in my profile) and feel free to hit me up in the future if and when they actually get built and are ready to ship.

Good luck!
Steve Jobs as a good person
Scottish - looking for co-founder
I don't know how many Scots are here but I'm in West Dunbartonshire, looking for someone near here to work with.

E-mail me!
Wow, great to see a reply from you, and thanks for taking feedback :)
Ask HN: how do you prepare for a traffic spike (i.e. from HN)?
You see this all the time. Blogs or websites go down when they reach the main page of Hacker News.

My question is, what do you do to prepare if you are expecting such traffic hikes? I use hostgator for example and have never had massive amounts of traffic to any of my sites as of yet, but wonder how it would hold up under intense loads that HN or reddit might bring.
I wonder what life is like at github when the site is down (like now)¿
Booleans are Baaaaaaaaaad
Friday. And I just lost the game.
Hackation in NYC - Free Trip for Outstanding Hackers
Except that the heliocentric model greatly simplified calculations. Take a look at Ptolemy's (and others) many epicycle model for something super complex and still not very accurate.
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Many Gameloft titles are available for free on App Store for few hours only, it’s time to grab your favorite one !
While I wouldn't entirely discount the notion that we're living in a simulation, I suspect that this measurement is probably quite problematic, for various reasons other people have addressed. Nevertheless, this article got me thinking:

Really? Can we actually simulate any part of the universe with 100% quantum accuracy? I hadn't heard about that, and it seems a bit implausible to me. But okay, fine, let's take it as a given that we can in fact simulate a volume a few femtometres in diameter, as the article says. Furthermore, let's say that our universe-simulating capability increases in line with Moore's Law, doubling every 18 months without regards for the limits of silicon or anything else.

The question is: how long would it take us to become those universe-simulating gods?

This is not a serious question, just a fun little exercise. If all of the above are true, then what will we be able to simulate, and when?:

2019: The nucleus of a single gold atom (8.45 femtometres)

2077: An entire helium atom (62 picometres)

2090: A cesium atom (423 picometres)

2115: A ribosome (20 nanometres)

2152: A red blood cell (7 micrometres)

2192: The smallest vertibrate, Paedophryne amauensis (7.7 millimetres)

2217: A human brain (150 millimetres)

2245: A small apartment and its occupants (10 metres)

2274: A small town (1 kilometre)

2335: Planet Earth (12,742 kilometres)

2407: The earth-moon system (812,000 kilometres)

2454: The inner solar system, inclusive of the asteroid belt (6.6 AU)

2475: The entire solar system, to the extremities of the Kuiper built (200 AU)

2516: Sol's sphere of influence, to the edges of the Oort cloud (100,000 AU)

2589: The Milky Way galaxy (120,000 light years)

2617: The Local Group of galaxies (10,000,000 light years)

2670: The observable universe (29,400,000,000 light years)

...But seeing as none of the initial assumptions are likely to be true, alas for all that. Would be kind of cool, though! (also, a femtometre is really bloody small)

[Edit: mixed up radius & diameter for the size of the observable universe. Hate it when that happens!]
I find it interesting that, at the the end of the article, the point is made that failing to find evidence in the relevant measurement doesn't necessarily indicate that we're not in a simulation, followed straight after by the remark that it is worth making so as to rule out that we're living in one. Isn't that a lot like giving a null hypothesis and suggesting we go out and prove it?
What a terrific idea! I notice they are using hydropower. I guess the Pi is small enough to not bother a lot and uses little enough power to keep the costs down. Clever way to promote your services :)
Since the other submission seems to have disappeared, here's the associated blog post:

https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect
In addition to hardware capabilities and responsiveness mentioned by others, the performance data (CPU usage, memory usage, battery usage, etc) of a real device will be vastly different than the emulated version. In addition, emulators typically do not run manufacturer or carrier ROMs, meaning that the behavior on the emulator often differs from the actual device.

For testing initial layouts or on-the-fly development, emulators are fine because they offer instant local access (After the setup, of course, but who cares now that x86 emulators are so fast). For complete testing real devices are a must. That's traditionally been expensive, but there are solutions to that, such as the company I founded, AppThwack, and our competitors like TestDroid. Test locally on emulators, and test periodically on real consumer devices.

There's a reason nearly every development shop has a cupboard full of devices, and it's not because they couldn't figure out how to get a few emulators running.
EBay's site redesign & Pinterest-like discovery feed
I had the same fear as you, initially. It's true that there are a lot of possible devices, versions, screen sizes etc. But in all reality, you mostly need to care about 2-3 devices.

- OS: Android 2.2/2.3 and 4.x. (Rest doesn't matter, honestly)

- Device sizes: a big/new samsung galaxy-sized one (~ 1200x700), one 320x480 and maybe a smaller one.

Depends a bit on your target demography.

This isn't actually too much worse than what you have with iOS these days, where you have retina + non-retina + tall device. (possibly + iPad). And possibly 3 iOS versions to think about - 4.3, 5.1 and 6.0.
That's why i couldn't install RVM just now :(
There must be a fuller version floating around, though; my PDF version has 548 pages and ends with Appendix E, 'Multivariate Gaussian Integrals'.

EDIT: In case anyone wants to make me feel bad about pirating, Jaynes is dead, and besides that, I bought a hardcopy as backup.
Yes:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...

are two of which I'm aware, but they're not free. They worked well when I had my own calendar server, integrating into the "Accounts and sync" section of the settings, thus providing fairly seamless integration with the native calendar app, for example.
It bears some similarities to the ontological argument, but it's not fundamentally grounded in ontology. It's based on the hypothesis that simulation is possible, which is testable in some sense.

Say we cook up a little Earth simulator, and it spontaneously generates a perfect being with both agency and omniscience. That would be a fair bit of evidence for the ontological argument, yes?

That's also why I say "completely accurate". A really rigorous argument relies on recursive simulation, since creating a simulation that couldn't be the universe isn't very strong evidence. (I'm typing on one right now, in fact.) If we make a completely accurate simulation, we can skip the step of proving that we can make a simulation of it, because we already did.
I think this is the exactly the right place and the right time for such an event. Great to see it in my backyard!
You receive a call at 3 AM from someone in the marketing department, asking if there is a problem with the web site because they haven't seen an order in 20 minutes. How do you know if you should get up and investigate or tell them a 20 minute gap at 3 AM is nothing to worry about but call back if it reaches 45 minutes, if you do not know anything about probability and statistics?

You are thinking of including 30 days of toll free phone support with your next product, and have calculated that for this to work out financially you will need less than 1% of your customers to call support. How do you figure out from the record of bug discovery and severity in your testing group's bug tracker if your testing program the probability that your product as it stands is good enough to meet that requirement, and how do you determine how confident you should be of that result, if you do not know anything about probability and statistics?
I used it to pay someone for some contracting work. It was nice to only have to pay $0.25 fee instead of 3%.
I have a friend who works on their support team. I'm imagining everyone going absolutely bonkers right now.
The raspberry Pi + tarsnap or dropbox is the disposable computer I've wanted for a while.

That plus cheap access to a massively parallel computer could also be very interesting.

Except where raspberry Pi + online storage could be useful to many, many people. Massive parallelism is probably only interesting to folks like us.
Better Subjects Make Email More Productive
For gamblers, near-misses provide a dangerous reward
"Spacetime is a Minkowski space" is why. Remember that mysterious viscosity cannot explain particle slowdown, because the particles appear to be perfectly normal in a co-moving reference frame.

If you're looking for something more than a model that correctly predicts the universe, you're looking for something other than physics.
Ask HN: Learning programming without math?
Hi, I've tried learning programming in a few months(well, maybe years, depends how you count). I got a problem though, every single book I read using mathematical problems in its examples. I'm in elementary school, and I haven't done any advanced mathematics yet so some of this stuff is completely new to me. It forces me to focus on the math instead of the programming, and it feels that is the source of my failures. Is there a way to learn programming without math?
http://xkcd.com/505/